In the modern industrial system, especially in the silicon-based material industry, pebbles play an indispensable and important role. Their main component, silicon dioxide (quartz), is the core raw material for manufacturing industrial silicon and solar-grade polysilicon. These products are further widely used in the photovoltaic industry and electronic semiconductor industry, providing a solid material foundation for the development of these two strategic emerging industries.
In terms of advantages, as a raw material for industrial silicon, pebbles have significant material advantages. They have uniform material, pure composition, and highly consistent mineral and chemical compositions. This characteristic enables the accurate extraction of high-grade silica raw materials with the help of advanced technologies such as AI sorting in areas rich in pebble resources in Northwest and Southwest China. These high-grade raw materials can just meet the strict requirements for raw material quality in the high-end silicon-based industrial chain, providing strong support for the high-end development of China's silicon-based industry.
However, pebbles also have certain disadvantages in industrial applications. On one hand, traditional sorting technology faces bottlenecks. It is often helpless for minerals with extremely similar physical properties, such as quartz and feldspar. Due to the high similarity of these two minerals in external characteristics such as color, shape, and surface luster, traditional technologies are difficult to distinguish them accurately, resulting in low sorting accuracy, poor efficiency, and thus serious waste of resources. On the other hand, pebble machine-made sand has problems in particle shape and gradation. Its particles are sharp, angular, rough in surface, and the particle gradation is slightly poor. These factors directly lead to poor workability of concrete, affecting its application effect in construction and other related fields .
To address the above problems, we can take the following improvement measures. Firstly, introduce AI intelligent sorting technology. This technology uses hyperspectral imaging and deep learning models, which can accurately identify the characteristics of silica in milliseconds, making the sorting accuracy stably exceed 95%. This breakthrough not only greatly improves the sorting efficiency but also significantly increases the resource utilization rate, effectively alleviating the resource waste problem caused by traditional sorting technology. Secondly, optimize the machine-made sand production process. Specifically, we can select appropriate sand-making equipment to ensure better particle shape of machine-made sand; rationally utilize the stone powder content in the sand, and control the stone powder content by means of dry dust collection or wet water washing ; scientifically adjust the sand ratio, and select appropriate admixtures and other measures. Through these multi-faceted efforts, we can comprehensively improve the workability of concrete and enhance the performance of pebble machine-made sand in practical applications.